Royce looked down at the knife, as if to wish it away. He took hold of Quinn’s hand but was suddenly too weak to push it aside. Then his rain-beaten face seemed to run and distort like melting tallow, and when Quinn released the knife Royce fell backward into the bow of the boat and lay there, arms and legs splayed and knife still piercing his heart. His sightless green gaze flickered and dimmed, as the River of Souls carried the boat in the direction of the Green Sea on its sinuous path to the Atlantic.
Quinn leaped overboard. Her Daniel had risen back to the surface but his face was still underwater. She swam to him and lifted his face from the river, and there she saw the ugly darkening bruise and swelling at his left temple. For a few seconds he was still and her heart nearly broke because she feared she’d lost him again, and then his body convulsed and water burst from his mouth and nose and he drew in a ragged breath of air strained through the falling rain.
“Stay with me,” she pleaded, holding him close lest the river pull him under again. “Daniel…please stay with me.”
She thought he might have nodded, but she wasn’t sure.
For a moment she watched the boat carrying the body of Griffin Royce drift away until it was obscured by the curtains of rain. He would be no more threat or harm to anyone, she thought, unless he was as strong a spirit as her husband and could also find his way back from the vale of Death. But she didn’t believe God, in His final judgment, would allow such a wicked soul to find a way through. Then, holding tightly and lovingly to her Daniel, the girl from Rotbottom struck out for the opposite shore.
Twenty
Magnus Muldoon was again a man on a mission.
Under the bright hot sunlight of morning he rowed up the River of Souls. He had asked for and been allowed this boat by Donovant Kincannon at the Green Sea plantation an hour earlier. The master of the Green Sea was once more on his feet, in spite of Dr. Stevenson’s admonitions to remain in bed for a few more days, but Sarah was being buried this afternoon in a plot beside the chapel. Kincannon was determined to bid farewell to his daughter while standing with his arm around his wife. In what was an unheard-of decision, the slaves Abram, Mars, Tobey and Granny Pegg were invited to the service, and Magnus as well. It was doubtful that Tobey would be there, as he was under the doctor’s care after the removal of the ball and the tending of two broken ribs. Magnus planned to be at Sarah’s funeral, but not in these grimy old clothes he was currently wearing.
Rain had fallen for two days straight, drowning out the fire that had been moving so hungrily through the forest. Magnus and the snake-bit but still surviving Caleb Bovie had found one of the boats left behind by the group of men Seth Lott had shepherded back to Jubilee, and rowing through the deluge they had come upon a strange sight: what at first appeared to be an empty rowboat drifting downriver, but which upon closer inspection revealed the corpse of Griffin Royce splayed at the bow, his eyes open toward the stormy heavens and a knife stuck in his heart.
He was a red-blooded man, that Royce, thought Magnus at the time. A lady-killer, possibly with a trail of dead ladies behind him…or, if not dead, at least changed for the worse. Gunn had known too many secrets about Royce, and might have been persuaded to spill them if Royce hadn’t blown his brains out. So there lay Royce, a heartless man felled by a wound to the heart…but who had struck the blow?
Upon reaching the Green Sea, Magnus had been told by Abram that Matthew and Quinn had been in the boat with Royce, but they’d been left behind and out of sight because of the rain and Abram’s haste to get help for Tobey. Matthew had had a pistol, Abram had said…but both he and Magnus had realized that the pistol likely was useless in such a downpour.
The question that Magnus intended to have answered this morning, and the reason for his mission, was to find out what had happened to Matthew and Quinn, and for that he was on his way to Rotbottom.
He rowed steadily past dozens of alligators lying motionless in the sun on either side of the river. Several drifted by his boat, and one particularly large beast bumped the bow with its knobby tail as it swam unhurriedly on. Further ahead he passed an area where several men in boats were using spears, nets and ropes to spear and trap their prey, and Magnus wondered if those nets had not recently brought up a few human remains. Not far beyond the realm of reptiles, daylight revealed the harbor of Rotbottom, a wharf around which were standing several weatherbeaten log structures, a few barns and livestock corrals, and back in the woods more log cabins and what appeared to be a larger meeting house at the center of town, if it could be called that.
Magnus approached the wharf and, spying an old man fishing nearby, called for a rope to be thrown to him to moor the rowboat. Directions were asked to the house of Quinn Tate, and the old man sent him off in search of a cabin “four to the left of the meetin’ house, got a flower garden in front, but,” the elder added, “that girl’s not right in the head, y’know.”
Magnus thanked him for this information and continued on his way.
The town of Rotbottom was not the collection of miserable hovels that Magnus had expected. The cabins were small, to be sure, but they were not very different from his own house. In fact, some were better maintained. The dirt streets were clean, willow and oak trees spread their leafy and cooling canopies over the roofs, and except for a fishy smell of decomposition wafting in the air—which Magnus took to be the odor of alligator innards or newly-skinned carcasses issuing from a barnlike structure that appeared to be a warehouse—Rotbottom was a community not unlike many others carved from the wilderness. Some of the houses had vegetable gardens and plots of corn. Apple, pear and peach trees grew in small orchards. There were chicken coops and hogpens, and a few cattle and horses grazing in corrals. Dogs bounded about, following the path of several children playing with rolling-hoops. As a stranger in town, Magnus attracted much attention from the children and from people sitting in the shade of their porches. He was called upon to pause, sit awhile and state his business but he had to go on, and soon found himself approaching the door of Quinn Tate’s house, if he’d followed the directions correctly. Someone was inside, because cooking-smoke was rising from the chimney.
He knocked at the door and waited. It was a tidy-looking place with a small porch, but all the windows were shuttered.
Still he waited. He knocked again, a little harder.
Did he hear a movement from within? He wasn’t sure. “Quinn Tate!” he called. “It’s Magnus Muldoon! You in there?”
And now…yes…he did hear footsteps creak the floorboards. But yet the door did not open, and Magnus had the feeling that if the girl was indeed on the other side, she was standing with her hand on the latch and indecision in her addled mind.
“I need to speak to you,” he said, quietly but firmly. “I’m lookin’ for Matthew. Do you know where he is?”
A few more seconds passed. And then a latch was turned and the door opened a crack, and there was Quinn’s face…strained and frightened-looking, with a bruised nose and dark blue bruises under both swollen eyes.
“Oh,” said Magnus, unnerved at the sight. “What happpened to you?”
“The man hit me,” she answered. “The pistol…it was wet. All that rain, comin’ down. He tried to get away.” She gazed past Magnus, as if expecting he’d brought someone else with him. “You’re alone?”
“I am.”
“Thought you were dead. That Royce killed you, with the others.”
“He tried,” said Magnus. “And he came awful close.”
“I thought…somebody might be comin’ for me. To take me off, maybe. I stabbed that man in the heart, and I left the knife in him. I had to…after what he did.”